Sweet Land of Liberty: The Ordeal of the American Revolution in Northampton County, Pennsylvania

Introduction

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Immigrants drifted into the northern part of Bucks County, Pennsylvania, around 1725. Twenty-five years later some 5,000 persons inhabited this region . Craving convenient access to county courts and officials,these settlers appealed to the governor to detach nine townships from Upper Bucks and treat them as the nucleus of a new county.This initiative resulted in the formation of Northampton County in 1752.1 Northampton encompassed the entire northeastern corner of the province, an area of more than 5,000 square miles.The county was bounded on the north by New York, on the east by the Delaware River, on the south by Bucks County, and on the west by Berks County. Kittatinny Mountain, commonly known as Blue Mountain, stretched across Northampton.South of the mountain lay the Lehigh Valley, which attracted the majority of settlers .Above the mountain,the land rolled northward in a seemingly endless succession of ridges and narrow valleys. Beyond the gap in Blue Mountain carved by the Delaware River, narrow strips of alluvial soil lined both sides of the waterway. By 1774 the number of inhabitants in Northampton County had risen to 15,000,or about 5 percent of Pennsylvania’s population.2 Persons of German ancestry comprised close to 80 percent of the county’s inhabitants. Scots-Irish, English, Huguenots, Dutch, and Welsh made up the balance. Half of the total population was twenty-one years of age or younger.3 Northampton boasted three towns, each situated about fifty miles north of Philadelphia: Allentown, Bethlehem, and Easton, the county seat. The second-largest of eleven Pennsylvania counties, Northampton contained twenty-five townships: eighteen in the Lehigh Valley and seven north of Blue Mountain.4 Each township functioned as an outpost of law and order. Inhabitants elected a number of officials, of which the most important was a constable who served warrants issued by justices of the peace, presided over township elections, and enforced the law that forbade drinking in public houses on Sundays.5 A cash economy had begun to replace subsistence farming in Northampton .The grain harvest in 1774 would have filled 4,500 Conestoga wagons . Sixty gristmills and and thirty sawmills dotted the landscape. The inhabitants tended 3,000 horses and mares, 3,400 horned cattle, and more than 1,000 sheep.6 Nearly 200 men engaged in a trade. Taverners, forty-six in number, headed the list. Inhabitants with financial means acquired indentured servants and Negro slaves. Scattered about the county were places of worship for Reformed, Lutherans, Presbyterians, Moravians, and Mennonites . Reformed, with twenty-three congregations, and Lutherans, with twenty, greatly outnumbered all other religious groups in Northampton.7 Moravians and other sects comprised fewer than 10 percent of the inhabitants .8 Four times a year the population of Easton swelled as inhabitants and officials visited the town for quarter sessions courts. In 1772 a visitor described the Northampton seat as“a dog-hole of a place, remote from all the world.”9 Nonetheless, Easton, with its courthouse, seventy-five shops and houses, and a population of about 400,was the burgeoning center for business and politics in Northampton. Moreover, Easton straddled the primary inland highway of the colonial period. From this county town travelers ferried across the Delaware River and headed northeast to Morristown,Hackensack , Perth Amboy, New York City, and New England, or followed improved roads west and southwest to Bethlehem, Allentown, Reading, Lancaster, York, the Shenandoah Valley, and beyond. Many Northampton inhabitants not only had risen above a marginal existence but also had tired of jousting with officials in Philadelphia. For more than two decades,the legislative and executive branches of the provincial government had ignored their grievances. To begin with, the Pennsylvania Assembly and the proprietaries logrolled the bill that established Northampton. Eager to preserve their controlling majority, the old-guard faction in the Assembly agreed in 1752 to place the county seat at Easton— a new town to be erected on land owned by the Penn family—in return for a provision that limited to one the number of representatives in the new county.10 Subsequently, the Assembly not only tabled petitions to move the seat to a location more central for the majorityof the people, but it also sidetracked repeated attempts to increase the size of the county’s delegation in the Assembly.11 . . . . . . . . . Machinations of this sort bred contempt for government, which surfaced in 1765 when Northampton’s inhabitants...